From The Reactionary Mind - By Corey Robin, and NakedCapitalism.com

The problem with The Reactionary Mind is not that the pithy passages are hard to find, it's that the whole book is pithy. That said, here are a few excerpts:

p. 15: "Historically, the conservative has sought to forestall the march of democracy in bot the public and the private spheres, on the assumption that advances in the one necessarily spur advances in the other. ...'to keep the state out of the hands of the people,' wrote the French monarchist Louis de Bonald, 'it is necessary to keep the family out of the hands of women and children.'

"Still, the more profound and prophetic stance on the right has ben [John] Adams's: cede the field of the public, if you must, but stand fast in the private. Allow men and women to become democratic citizens of the state; make sure they remain feudal subjects in the factory, and the field. The priority of conservative political argument has been the maintenance of private regimes of power--even at the cost of the strength and integrity of the state."

And, from NakedCapitalism.com

Meanwhile, Yves Smith says "democracy and democratically-organized organizations don’t scale well, as anyone who participated in Occupy Wall Street and encountered 'stack' can tell you. Mondragon is the world’s largest worker cooperative. But it’s actually 257 companies, so the average company size is under 300 employees. Many lines of enterprise have economies of scale or scope. That means smaller entities, unless they have managed to create a defensible niche, will be at a big disadvantage. Scale in turn virtually necessitates hierarchy. Even Mondragon has had to relent on its 'maximum wage' rules [wherein the average boss's salary is limited by what the workforce gets paid] and has widened the gap between minimum and maximum pay.

As we explained long-form in [her book] ECONNED, the reversion to a more tooth-and-claw form of capitalism is the direct result of a concerted and well-funded effort, codified in the Powell Memo of 1971, to move the values of the US to the right. One of the proof of the success of this campaign has been the successful attack on unions and the erosion of worker rights. Another is deregulation and the denigration of government employees and government service. I’m old enough to remember, for instance, when the SEC and the FDA were respected and feared."

Back to The Reactionary Mind:

p. 243: "Trump's ascendancy suggests that the lower orders are no longer satisfied with the racial and imperial privileges the [conservative] movement has offered them. The right has reversed many of the gains of the Civil Rights Movement: the schools that African Americans in the South attend today are more segregated than they were under Richard Nixon; the racial wealth gap has tripled since 1984; and in sever states, voting rights for African Americans are under attack. Yet a combination of stagnating wages, rising personal and household debt, and increasing precarity--coupled with the tormenting symbolism of a black president and the greater visibility of black and brown faces in the culture industries--has made the traditional conservative offering seem scant to its white constituents. The future of the United States as a minority-majority nation axcerbates this anxiety. Racial dog whistles no longer suffice; a more brazen sount is required.

"Trump is that sound."

p.245: "Without a formidable enemy on the left, without an opponent to discipline and tutor the right, the long-standing fissures of the conservative movement are allowed to deepen and expand.

"That absent tutelage is most visibly embodied in Trump, whose whims are as unlettered as his mind is untaught. ... Trump is a window onto the dissolution of the conservative whole, a while that is dissolving because its victories have been so great, a whiloe that can allow itself to collapse because it has achieved so much. Battling its way to hegemony in the second half of the twentieth century, the American right would never has chosen a Trump--not because it was more intelligent or virtuous, not because it was less racist or violent, but because it was disciplined by its task of destroying the left. Having achieved that task, it can now afford, can now allow itself, the lucury of irresponsibility. Or so it believes..."

p.249: "When it comes to saying something with buildings, however, Trump is less concerned with their size and scale than with their surfaces. ... [unlike Ayn Rand] Trump makes almost no mention of design, engineering, or even architecture....he becomes the most observant diarist, recording detail after loving detail of the beauty of [the surfaces] he sees and its effects upon him."

p.251: "Trump's sensibility, it turns out, is less monumental than ornamental... It was opulent and ostentatious, loud and luxurious, vicious and vulgar. ...

"Trump is not unaware of the political provenance of his actions: 'What I'm doing is about as close as you're going to get, in the twentieth century, to the quality of Versaillles.'"